Abstract
Fiat’s Falcon 30 jet landed at Linate airport on schedule, ten in the morning, and taxied up to the terminal. Two policemen climbed the passenger steps and entered the cabin, where I was waiting for them. Then, kindly but firmly, they accompanied me down holding me by the arms, as if they were afraid I might make a run for it across the airport grass and runways.
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Notes
- 1.
There were also 53 direct subsidiaries, operating in places where it had not been possible to find the right kind of dealer, and 2,004 sub-networks, i.e., customer service points.
- 2.
Originally, the discount was 15 % of the list price, equal for all dealers. Often, however, the end client managed to obtain higher discounts and the dealers involved complained to Iveco that, after much argument, accepted the burden. Even in this case the dealers remained in possession of a considerable sum, with which, after having paid their own running costs, they did as they wished. Towards the mid Eighties, Riccardo Ruggeri, the vice president of the Divisions, had introduced a modification and had transformed the discount from a theoretical percentage of the price list to the real value of net sales. He had reduced the figure, coming down from 15 % equal for all to a sum between 10 and 12 %, which differed from one case to another. Ruggeri was proud of his initiative, with which he had improved Iveco’s margins in a division that had always produced losses, right from the construction of the large factory in Valle Ufita, whose failure to work at full capacity had weighed on company accounts; the saving had added to the improved efficiency that in the second half of the 1980s had made it possible to rescue Iveco.
- 3.
I numbered the days as from 28 March 1993. From my notes of that period it is clear that some were taken down at the time while other comments were added later, but still close to the time of events.
- 4.
Translator’s note: 8 September 1943 was the date of the armistice signed by the Italians with the Allies at the end of the last war, a date commonly considered to signify a national disaster.
- 5.
Translator’s note: Italy’s major court of last resort.
- 6.
If they had read this statement, Gianni Barbacetto, Peter Gomez, and Marco Travaglio, authors of the book titled Mani pulite. La vera storia (Rome, Editori Riuniti, 2002), would not have said that I was the one who involved Mattioli in things (p. 183).
- 7.
Translator’s note: an Italian political commentator.
- 8.
Translator’s note: associazione a delinquere usually refers to the mafia, against which the law was originally intended. The prosecutors made a lot of use of this in the “Clean Hands” affair.
- 9.
I do not possess a copy of Riccardo Ruggeri’s statements; I take them from a very well informed article in “l’Espresso” of 25 April 1993 whose headline was Qui Londra, a voi Torino (London here, you have Turin), which also maintains that “Romiti should have been succeeded by Garuzzo, today under investigation. Umberto should have taken Gianni Agnelli’s place. But the Clean Hands storm has upset plans for the future”. There’s more: “Garuzzo organizes a strategy full of irregularities and Ruggeri obeys, in an official statement: ‘Garuzzo passed on the operative task to me’. Riccardo Ruggeri’s line of defence, worked out with his lawyer Brepner, clearly achieved its goals.
- 10.
“Undisclosed” simply because they had not asked me.
- 11.
“Financial Times”, 8 April 1993.
- 12.
All the newspapers, even those left-wing ones less favourable to Fiat, highlighted my operative past in industry, sparing me political connotations. In some cases they even gave me good publicity, describing my years of work and presenting me as Cesare Romiti’s successor-designate and the man who would lead the transition towards the new, all accompanied by nice photos. “il Giorno” ran a headline: “Fiat, another blow to the heart”, and in the article on page 7: “[Garuzzo] a tireless worker who shuns the social whirl”. “L’Unità”, beneath the headline: “A reserved mountain man, tenacious and obdurate”, regaled me with an authentic funeral oration written by Michele Costa. Almost the same line was followed by Paolo Griseri in “il manifesto”, beneath the headline: “Fiat director arrested. Sorrow in corso Marconi as Agnelli loses another heir”, and then: “The man called to represent the transition [from Romiti’s power group], Garuzzo, is under investigation in his turn. Romiti’s and Agnelli’s successors are a question mark once more”. The “Corriere della Sera” described me as a “calm Piedmontese, who doesn’t raise his voice. Convinced that there is a rational solution for every problem”, and attributed to me “the signature below the great foreign deals”.
- 13.
AGI news agency of 8 April, at 19:35.
- 14.
AGI news agency of 8 April, at 12:29 and ANSA at 12:57.
- 15.
AGI news agency of 8 April, at 18:47 and ANSA at 19:57.
- 16.
Translator’s note: i.e. against organized mafia.
- 17.
“il Giornale” of 18 April 1993.
- 18.
Translator’s note: a paramilitary police body whose tasks include the prevention of fraud, tax evasion, smuggling and so on. Widely used by the Clean Hands prosecutors instead of police and carabinieri.
- 19.
“il manifesto”, for example, headlined: “Agnelli confesses his guilt, Fiat bows to the judges”; then it goes over the score: “Mr Agnelli reproves Romiti and covers his head with ashes”. And “la Repubblica”: “Bribes, Agnelli admits ‘Fiat, too, has made mistakes…’”.
- 20.
Romiti-Pansa, op. cit., p. 4.
- 21.
Romiti-Pansa, op. cit., p. 8.
- 22.
Romiti-Pansa, op. cit., p. 11.
- 23.
Romiti-Pansa, op. cit., p. 9.
- 24.
Romiti-Pansa, op. cit., p. 14.
- 25.
Giancarlo Boschetti later told the judges that I had been the one who had “handed over the power” to him for the financing of Caprotti. Perhaps he hoped to alleviate his position and judged that I had broad shoulders. His expression had a military air about it that the prosecutors liked, but they did not realize that in a company the size of Iveco it would have taken ages to hand over such powers. It was the entire company machinery, with all its functions, offices, and dirigenti, which ensured the continuity of the firm’s commitments. The handover of power to me from Manina had lasted no longer than a farewell (Chap. 5); Boschetti had become my successor after being with me for seven years, an important member of the Steering Committee.
- 26.
Translator’s note: the main news agency in Italy.
- 27.
27 April 1993, at 12:13.
- 28.
Translator’s note: this is how Wikipedia reports the facts: Craxi was to receive the first of his many prosecution notices in December 1992. Many more followed next January and February until the Court of Milan explicitly asked Parliament for authorisation to bring Craxi to trial for bribery and corruption (at the time, in Italy MPs were immune from prosecution unless Parliament gave its authorisation). The authorisation was denied on 29 April 1993 after Craxi gave an emotional speech.
- 29.
The House granted authorization to proceed against Bettino Craxi for the hypothesis of corruption limited to Rome, but rejected the hypothesis of corruption in Milan and of graft both in Rome and in Milan.
- 30.
The record of the questioning is extraordinarily brief and is summed up in three sentences that run to fifteen lines in all: “I authorized the operation in question”, “I passed on to Aimetti the task of finding a way”; “The idea of using the absolutely non-domestic transaction channel was given to me by Paolo Mattioli”.
- 31.
Translator’s note: Antonio Gramsci, a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy, was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime, and died in jail. His letters are recorded in his “Prison Notebooks”.
- 32.
From the findings of the maxi-inquiries of the early 1990s, there emerged cases of gigantic import, in which certain businessmen obtained extraordinary benefits from the unscrupulous use of equally extraordinary sums. In these cases there is an enormous difference with regard to the “normal” management that was established in the country in those years. According to me, popular sensibility grasped the difference, but this was never classified in law nor discussed by “opinion makers” or analyzed academically. And many of those entrepreneurs were “state” entrepreneurs.
- 33.
Translator’s note: an eminent lawyer, professor and judge of the Corte Costituzionale.
- 34.
Translator’s note: an eighteenth-century Italian writer and prison reformer.
- 35.
This was a substantial paradox, a dichotomy from which it was hard to find a way out. On the one hand, if it made it possible to protract the sequence of inquiries endlessly it would also have permitted the perpetuation of the clandestine game of blackmail to the detriment of those who had some political or industrial responsibilities in the 1980s and were yet to be discovered; in other words everybody. On the other hand, an amnesty would have remedied this corrupt situation, but would have involved impunity even for serious offences that cried out for vengeance in the eyes of public opinion. Perhaps, I try to imagine, they should have granted an official pardon conditioned by acknowledgement of the facts, like a kind of amnesty for the infringement of building regulations. I know I seem anti-conformist, but I think that those who destroyed a collective good for all generations to come by building an immense condominium where natural beauty had reigned for millennia, are far more deplorable than the Iveco dealer Luigi Caprotti, the only consequence of whose act in the long term was that the citizens of Milan travelled on buses manufactured by their fellow countrymen. Yet Caprotti personally suffered a harsh punishment whereas construction speculators settled their score by filling in an anonymous form and paying very little. It is the price of democracy, where crimes committed by a few persons in a specific job, if they are discovered, count for more than collective crimes, because of electoral algebra. But I do not wish to go beyond the sequence of “better” and “worse”, which makes it possible to justify almost everything. Only the recollection of what happened on the part of those who knew how the facts really unfolded can help to put matters in the correct historical perspective, and pace to those who pocketed the money and those who paid the price.
- 36.
This was one of the fundamental points in the theory of the “disappearance” of Fiat, which Riccardo Ruggeri had outlined to me on 29 March 1993 (day 2 of my chronicle).
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Garuzzo, G. (2014). The Judicial Issue (1993). In: Fiat. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04783-6_9
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